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Nevil Shute (1899-1960) - original name Nevil Shute Norway | |
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British-born Australian novelist, an accomplished storyteller, whose best-known work, ON THE BEACH (1957), was adapted for the screen in 1959. The picture became one of the most celebrated anti-Bomb films, and attracted much attention in Moscow because it was the first full-length American feature to have a premiere in the Soviet Union. Shute was educated as an aeronautical engineer and he used his expertise on technical issues and knowledge of aviation in his books. His novels PIED PIPER (1942) and A TOWN LIKE ALICE (1959) have also been made into major films. "A beautiful aircraft is the expression of the genius of a great engineer who is also a great artist. It is impossible for that man to carry out the whole of the design himself; he works through a design office staffed by a hundred draughtsmen or more. A hundred minds, each with their own less competent ideas, are striving to modify the chief designer's original conception. If the design is to appear in the end as a great artistic unity, the chief designer must be a man of immensely powerful will, capable of imposing his idea and his way of doing things on each of his hundred draughtsmen, so that each one of them is too terrified to insert any of his own ideas." (from No Highway, 1948) Nevil Shute was born in Ealing, Middlesex. His father was Arthur Hamilton Norway, C.B., an assistant secretary of the General Post Office in London, and his mother was the former Mary Louisa Gadsden. Shute was educated at schools in Oxford, Shrewsbury, and Woolwich. After witnessing the Easter Rising in Dublin, where he was a volunteer stretcher-bearer, Shute entered Balliol College, Oxford. He spent the later stages of World War I in military service and then continued his studies in Oxford, graduating in 1922. In 1922 Shute joined the de Havilland Aircraft Company. He worked as an aeronautical engineer, specializing in Zeppelins. He was a deputy chief on the Rigid Airship R100 project, one of the last of the British airships. He flew twice to America aboard it. The project ended after the 1930 R101 disaster. Next year Shute founded Airspeed Ltd., an aircraft construction company. He married Frances Mary Heaton, a doctor, with whom he had two daughters. As a novelist Shute made his debut in 1926 with MARAZAN. It was followed by SO DISDAINED (1928), LONELY ROAD (1929) and RUINED CITY (1938). His company had grown successfully, employing about a thousand people, and Shute decided to resign and devote himself entirely to writing. His novel Pied Piper became a huge success and also was adapted for the screen, for the first time in 1942. In the story an elderly man, John Sidney Howard, helps a swarm of children to escape the Nazis from France to the United States. In the beginning John reluctantly promises an English couple to take their two children with him back to England. During his journey through France the group grows, and John submits to his role as the "Pied Piper". "He sat down again, and began to fashion a whistle with the pen-knife that he kept for scraping out his pipe... The Cavanagh children stood by him watching his slow, wrinkled fingers as they worked; in their faces incredulity melted into interest. He stripped the bark from the twig, cut deftly with the little knife, and bound the bark into place. He put it to his lips, and it gave out a shrill note." The book had two sequels, PASTORAL (1944) and MOST SECRET (1945). During WW II Shute served as a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and contributed to the development of a number of top-secret, specialized weapons. In 1944 he was sent to Normandy as a correspondent. In 1945 he was in Burma as correspondent for the Ministry of Information. "He glanced around the ice-cream parlour. 'If everything you want to do works out like this,' he said slowly, 'you'll have a town as good as Alice Springs in no time.' From 1950 Shute lived permanently in Australia, settling on a farm at Langwarrin, Victoria. His later novels were mostly set in his new home country, among them A Town Like Alice. As in Pied Piper, Shute uses a narrator, who relates the story of the central characters to readers. It tells of Jean Paget, a London typist, and her trek from Japanese-occupied Malaya to the Australian outback. In Malaya during her imprisonment she befriends Joe Harman, an Australian ringer, who steals five chickens for women prisoners and is crucified in punishment. After the war she hears Joe is still alive. They meet again and start their life together in Willstown. The book was based on a real-life incident. Shute expected to be accused of falsifying history and wrote in the author's note: "After the conquest of Malaya in 1942 the Japanese invaded Sumatra and quickly took the island. A party of about eighty Dutch women and children were collected in the vicinity of Padang. The local Japanese commander was reluctant to assume the responsibility for these women and, to solve his problem, marched them out of his area; so began a trek all round Sumatra which lasted for two and a half years. At the end of this vast journey less than thirty of them were still alive." On the Beach was a pessimistic tale of the atomic age. In the novel the feared nuclear war has eliminated all life in the northern hemisphere, leaving Australia to await the inevitable spread of radioactive contamination, that will end the rest of the human life on Earth. Shute depicts people faced with inevitable doom, but his characters are not desperate. They try to spend their last months normally, planning garden works for the next ten years, going to work, watching Grand Prix races, learning to type. The hopeless relationship between U.S. Navy Captain Dwight Towers and Moira Davidson, the middle-aged daughter of a stockbreeder, ends in their separation: Towers takes his nuclear submarine to the sea, and Moira takes a pill from a red box, as do Mary and Peter, a young couple with their daughter Jennifer. The film version of On the Beach (1959), directed by Stanley Kramer, was a pessimistic anti-Bomb film, set in the year 1964. Stanley Kramer wanted to make a picture that "reflects the primary hopes and fears on the minds of all people today. Gregory Peck is the commander of a U.S. nuclear submarine that lands in Australia, the only country that has not yet been wiped out by atomic fallout. Peck has a desperate affair with Gardner - and he must decide whether to die with Gardner in Australia or go back to America so that his men can die on home soil. Gardner tells reporters: for making a picture about the end of the world, "this is the place to do it." Fred Astaire plays a disillusioned scientist who encapsulates the film’s theme: if we have nuclear weapons, they will be used, intentionally or by accident. 'Waltzing Matilda' plays throughout the film. The Pentagon refused to lend the use of an atomic submarine. Nevil Shute boycotted the entire venture. At the end of the film an abandoned banner is seen, reading 'There is still time... Brother'. The New York Daily News (December 18, 1959) condemned the film: "This is a would-be shocker which plays right up the alley of a) the Kremlin and b) the Western defeatists and/or traitors who yelp for the scrapping of the H-bomb. ... See this picture if you must (it seems bound to be much talked about), but keep in mind that the thinking it represents points the way toward eventual Communist enslavement of the entire human race." - Screenplay by John Paxton, starring Gregory Peck (Dwight Towers), Fred Astaire (Julian Osborn), Ava Gardner (Moira Davidson), Anthony Perkins (Peter Holmes) Shute's career spanned 30 years and he published 25 books, among them his autobiography SLIDE RULE in 1954. The name refers to a calculating device used by engineers before pocket calculators and computers. Shute was a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He died on January 12, 1960, in Melbourne. For further reading: Nevil Shute by J. Smith (1976); The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1985); World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 4, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996) - Note: The theme of the end of the world has been subject in many novels throughout literary history. Mary Shelley wrote in 1826 a gloomy Great Plague story The Last Man, the atomic bomb was depicted in H.G. Wells's The World Set Free (1914), apocalyptic visions have inspired Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Cat's Cradle (1963) and Galapagos (1985), Ray Bradbury's story The Last Day, James Blish's The Triumph of Time (1958), Bernard Malamud's God's Grace (1982). - For further information: The End of the World, ed. by Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander (1983). Selected works:
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